Small town coffee shop and a Big Sky.

My body aches, the sun is way too loud, and the ghost of my grandfather snoozed my alarm clock this morning in celebration of his birthday. I woke up around 11:30 scrambling to get to work dialogging with my grandfather about how frustrated I was that he decided it would be a good idea for me to sleep in a little bit later. I think i got his point though, I drove into town today to go to work and my boss told me that work was canceled due to lack of anything to do. You see, I live in the house my mother grew up in, a 3 bedroom 2 story house that was a fire station back in the late 19th century. Back in 1994 my grandfather died in the shed out back of a heart attack. He is a peaceful ghost though, I am pretty sure he lives in the lights around the house. That is why i keep my bedroom lamp on all night, it is nice to keep him with me. Sound crazy? Try living in a century old house by yourself for a month and you tell me what happens to your mind after a while.

Small towns will do it to you too. Mistrust abounds in these small communes across America. I blame coke and meth addicts, but do I look like a crack head? I would go with no. No, I don’t want to steal your shit. I just want to talk about records and crazy events around the world and in the everyday lives of the ordinary common person. Exchange stories and maybe do some mind altering substances. Maybe this is why people murder, kill, rob and steal. Because people don’t trust them, or maybe it’s because they are crazy and unbalanced.

I digress though, from what I take my grandfather was a peaceful guy who loved to work on projects and make anything he could out of anything he had. He would make what my mom would call “stump furniture”, where he’d take a tree stump and turn it into a table, chair, or some other assorted piece of decor that would warrant a stump as a flat surface. The man was punk rock engineer. In the same way I shall channel his spirit in passing judgment on the people I am sharing space with in a coffee house in downtown small town anywhere. Today I don’t have any co-worker to speak to about all the wonderful things there are to speak about. If you don’t see the parallel, I will spell it out, work with what you got, life gives you lemons, make a soccer ball.

Bottom Floor Table 1 -

Two teachers and a laptop. One looks as if she has been marrilied happy for many years now, if happiness could be counted in flesh pouring over the waist of your pants, I would say she is fucking euphoric. She might as well invent a shirt that expresses the pastels of every color in the rainbow. Today is Lavender, I wonder what it will be tomorrow, maybe grey mixed with burnt umber. The other one is twice as diabolical. With a face that has only two emotions to express to anyone under the age of 25, those being, what the hell is your malfunction and envy. The latter being reserved for beautiful young women. She is happily married, but is probably disgusted by the fact that her husband hates her hair. I mean who wouldn’t, the process of fixing it is, comb, brush, pull back in pony tail and/or push back with a hair band. Maybe this process has pulled her face into a constant state of judgement, if so my previous observation is null and void. I figure though that the process would probably result in a constant profound look of shock though, so I might still be right. If humans had the need to have their clothes camouflage them in public this woman would probably be able to disappear into a wall covered with cut outs from a Chadwicks magazine.

Bottom Floor Table 2 -

This girl owns a cat, she jumps when people cough, and her lips are pursed tighter than the asshole of the most anal retentive of people. She brings home work from work because she chose a career in some form of data management to support her one true passion, collaging cute animals out of felt. The reason she brings the work home is because she has no ability to say no and it is pretty obvious that her boss is a go get em and she is a please thankyou. With the eyes of a bush baby and the mouth of a baby mouse she finds the darkest corner of the coffee shop to nest. Her years will pass as she goes through the work she has to do and looks for new stitch patterns on the world wide web.

Bottom floor table 3 -

Obviously this guy is a grad student, not the “I’ll stick around for like 3 years and slowly get my masters while taking 5 dollar courses while working at the school” the “gotta get into whatever field I am in as soon as possible so I can work on being important” sort of grad student. The sort of guy that you meet at a backyard bbq and engage in conversation about Camus and the death penalty, the kind of guy who wouldn’t give you a courtesy laugh if you said, “Grad student, more like RAD Student”. His work is so underrated.

Bottom floor table 4 -

Young mother, ugh, that empty gaze of child rearing, her eyes milky like an old dogs’.
Why’d you do it young woman? Billy could have used a prophylactic, you could have to.
I will sing a requiem for your youth and hope you don’t fall into being a “Cool Mom” that tries to relate to their kids by acting their kids age and in the process never growing old themselves.
I am not going to rip on her too badly, her child probably did that work for me.

Barista 1 -

She was a teen during the mid nineties and has made about a million mix cds of the songs she would listen to with her girlfriends while driving around back in high school. Luckily she has the where-with-all to cut off that God awful drunken South African before he says “you’re the dirty asshole” in his mid nineties man baby “Crash”. This catlike ability has aided her in not losing her job like so many hip baristas before her. Unlike most Barista’s her eyes couldn’t hide her disgust for my demeanor when i went to get my cup of drip coffee. Yes, I can’t afford a haircut, no it’s not hard to find a good guy, yes this will be your career for the next 10 years.

Top floor table 1 -

Young, mediocre, and prone to bouts of delusions of grandeur. Yes, this is yours truly. I am 6′1′, balding, and can’t find anything better to do doing the day than

call my grandmother and sit in a coffee shop judging everyone I see. I won’t go too far down this river and meet up with brando, I think I’ll just sit pretty in judgement of others. While they take care of judging my bozo hair and shoddy demeanor.

So there we go, a whole day wasted, gas money down the drain, and stripmall similarities got me down. These observations are not ones of comtempt or bitterness, this world is way too ridiculous not to make fun of and way too strange to take seriously. Especially when you are living in a small town, filled with awkward conversations, and a big sky.